Main menu

Post navigation

30,000 dead people registered to vote in North Carolina

According to a recent Charlotte Observer article, a Raleigh, North Carolina-based group devoted to reducing voter fraud has found nearly 30,000 names of dead people who are still registered to vote.

“It’s pretty clear that a few of those cases involved clerical errors on a busy election day,” said Jay DeLancy, Director of the Voter Integrity Project (VIP), “but others look a lot like identity theft at the ballot box. Either way, we will need to review each one very carefully.”

The nonpartisan group working toward clean, fair elections, compiled the list after obtaining death records from the state Department of Public Health and comparing them to existing voter rolls. VIP explained their findings in a post on their website:

The research almost ground to a halt when the group learned that some of the names on the list were from out-of-state deaths and are considered “unofficial,” even though the deaths were all reported through official government channels.

“It would seem normal for all states to share their death records with their out-of-state counterpart agencies,” said John Pizzo, Director of Research for VIP-NC, “but we were floored when North Carolina’s Registrar told us that South Carolina and Virginia have laws explicitly prohibiting the use of their mortality information for voter roll maintenance. Imagine that! We can use it for issues like corporate ownership and taxation, but not for taking dead people off the voter rolls!”

The dead, of course, are not responsible for removing their own names. The scandal here is that North Carolina voting officials can’t remove them, despite receiving reliable reports that the people are deceased, from neighboring state government authorities.

Apparently, the manpower required to confirm would bust their budgets. Also, this can cut two ways if they’re not confirmed. I’ve read of an instance where someone was ‘purged’ as being dead only to discover they were very much alive.